When families are priced out, the whole city pays the cost

Jackie Jenks is moved by tribute from her co-workers during her farewell party before her family leaves the state.

Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

People pack up and leave San Francisco every day, squeezed out by housing prices that are just too high. Some of those departures really hurt — not just the friends and co-workers left behind, but also the city itself.

On Monday, Jackie Jenks, executive director of Hospitality House, spent her last day on the job in the place she has worked for 22 years. She is credited with saving the homeless shelter and drop-in center, which was on the brink of financial collapse during the Great Recession. She founded an association of leaders of homeless nonprofits who have fought for change at City Hall — including, remarkably, ensuring that shelters have blankets and pillows, which they didn’t always have before.

“Her work had a profound effect on the policies and programs that exist here in San Francisco, and more importantly, a profound effect on impoverished people themselves,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

On Thursday, Jenks and her husband and three boys will pack into a minivan and drive to the five-bedroom home in North Carolina they bought for less than $400,000.

2of5Jennifer Friedenbach, left, hugs Jackie Jenks during Jenks' farewell party at Harry Harrington's Pub in San Francisco, Calif. Thursday, March 16, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

3of5Friends and co-workers raise their glass for a toast to Jackie Jenks during Jenks' farewell party at Harry Harrington's Pub in San Francisco, Calif. Thursday, March 16, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

4of5Co-workers snap pictures of the Jackie Jenks' cake, which depicts Jenks as Wonder Woman, at her farewell party at Harry Harrington's Pub in San Francisco, Calif. Thursday, March 16, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

5of5Friends and co-workers admire the cake at Jackie Jenks' farewell at Harry Harrington's Pub in San Francisco, Calif. Thursday, March 16, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

“It has a yard!” Jenks exclaimed as if reporting it also had a cache of gold discovered in the basement. Jenks has taken a job as the director of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Chapel Hill.

Despite the new house and gig, Jenks didn’t want to leave the Bay Area. But she faced the dilemma of so many families here: continue to squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment with little outdoor space or give up. When her third son was born a few months ago, the family, which was renting in Oakland, hoped to buy a three-bedroom home in Oakland or San Francisco and couldn’t.

The Board of Supervisors bid Jenks farewell midway through its meeting last week, with Supervisor Jane Kim crying as she thanked Jenks for her “cool-headed, unflappable and eternally optimistic” demeanor.

“It makes me so sad to know that families feel like they can’t stay here anymore, especially families that have invested in our neighborhoods and communities and have served us for decades doing incredible work,” Kim said through tears.

In her farewell to the board, Jenks alluded to the irony that people dedicating their careers to helping homeless people are in danger of being homeless themselves in this crazy-rich city. Other staffers at Hospitality House drive every day from the far reaches of eastern Contra Costa County — and even from Stockton.

“This city is so wealthy and so poor,” Jenks told the board. “We have people buying the most expensive housing in the entire country, yet we have more than 1,000 homeless people on a waiting list just to get a shelter bed. We have luxury housing being built in the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco, and meanwhile, nonprofit workers, teachers and nurses are commuting from Stockton and Antioch.”

As Jenks and her fans moved down the hall to drink Champagne and share memories in Kim’s office, Kim and the rest of the supervisors held a hearing to discuss the very issue that drove Jenks out: the city’s lack of family housing.

As I wrote in January, Supervisor Norman Yee commissioned a report from the Planning Department that describes the demographics of families in San Francisco and their lack of housing options. At the hearing Tuesday, supervisors quizzed Planning Director John Rahaim about the dearth of family housing, and it was clear that like so many hot-button issues facing the city, there are plenty of ideas, but so far, not a lot of action.

San Francisco notoriously has the smallest percentage of children of any city in the country; just 13.4 percent of residents here are younger than 18. Just 18 percent of the city’s households include children. That, too, is far lower than other cities — regardless of density.

According to the Planning Department, San Francisco has 17,169 people per square mile — far lower than the 27,016 per square mile in New York, a city in which 30.5 percent of households have children in them. Los Angeles is much less dense at 8,092 people per square mile, and 33.4 percent of households there include children.

The supervisors’ interest seemed piqued mostly by the planning report’s information on the changing socioeconomic composition of families in the city. Between 2000 and 2014, the percentage of families making less than $25,000 a year or more than $100,000 a year grew, while the percentage of those making $25,000 to $100,000 shrank considerably. (By far the biggest increase was for those families making more than $150,000, which now make up 30 percent of city households with kids.)

Of all the housing for sale in San Francisco in 2015, the Planning Department figured that just 9 percent of the homes with two or more bedrooms were affordable to median-income families. The vast majority of new housing being built is studios or one-bedrooms, and most of the existing housing that has two or three bedrooms is occupied by single people, roommates or families without kids.

Ideas being bandied about to ensure families have more options include: encouraging developments with flexible units that can be used as two studios or turned into larger family-friendly spaces; helping seniors who want to downsize from larger single-family homes after their children are grown so those homes are available for families with young kids; and encouraging the development of the “missing middle” — medium-size apartment buildings that are larger than single-family homes but far smaller than high-rise buildings. Rahaim said the latter might require changing the zoning laws in some residential neighborhoods to allow for bigger projects.

“There’s certainly not one magical solution here,” he said.

But Kim had an important question. “When are we going to start implementing some of these concepts?” she asked. “The crisis is now.”

As Jenks packs up her moving boxes to follow the well-worn path of countless nonprofit workers, teachers, artists and parents who’ve left a city that can’t afford to see them go, that statement couldn’t be more true.

Heather Knight is a columnist working out of City Hall and covering everything from politics to homelessness to family flight and the quirks of living in one of the most fascinating cities in the world. She believes in holding politicians accountable for their decisions or, often, lack thereof – and telling the stories of real people and their struggles.